Book Reviews
Romance Sphere presently accepts submissions only from members of the Harvard community, including visiting lecturers, visiting scholars, and alumni, as well as faculty and students from institutions with whom the department has reciprocal agreements.
Book Reviews
All'ombra dell'altra lingua: Per una poetica della traduzione
by Antonio Prete Bollati Boringhieri, 131 pp., € 16.00 JULIANNE VAN WAGENEN Antonio Prete, professor of comparative literature at the University of Siena, begins his book: “To translate is to transmute one language into another language. One text into...
Atlante della letteratura italiana, vol. II: Dalla Controriforma alla Restaurazione
a cura di Sergio Luzzatto e Gabriele Pedullà (vol. II a cura di Erminia Irace) Einaudi, 946 pp., ill., 85.00 € MARCO ARESU - Tra geografia e storia “Prometto di non scrivere nessuna storia letteraria, nessun capitolo di storia letteraria, prima di avere...
Bernini: His Life and His Rome
by Franco Mormando University of Chicago Press, 456 pp., € 35.00 JULIANNE VANWAGENEN In a Gian Lorenzo Bernini stream-of-consciousness word-association game one might come up with Rome, marble fountain, St. Peter’s, baroque, post-Reformation Catholicism...
Digital_Humanities
by Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, Jeffrey Schnapp MIT Press, 141 pp., $16.00 JULIANNE VANWAGENEN - Form or content? Both I was reading Digital_Humanities on a Saturday evening just as my roommates and a group of friends were...
Galileo's Muse: Renaissance Mathematics and the Arts
by Mark Peterson Harvard University Press, 338 pp., $28.95 PETER LIEBERMAN Very often it takes the work of an outsider, with a fresh pair of eyes, to make an original contribution to any academic field—especially a field such as Italian Studies, whose...
I funeracconti
by Benedetta Palmieri Feltrinelli, 140 pp., € 14.00 ELENA CAMPANI Abituati a vedere artisti e scrittori trattare il tema della morte in maniere piuttosto estreme, dal pulp allo spiritualismo olistico passando per gli psicodrammi stucchevoli, questo libro...
Il telescopio di Galileo. Una storia europea
by Massimo Bucciantini, Michele Camerota, Franco Giudice Einaudi, 306 pp., ill., € 25.00 ELOISA MORRA “Spesso – scriveva Aby Warburg – “il buon Dio si annida nei dettagli”. Ed è in due dettagli dei quadri sottostanti che è racchiusa la metamorfosi d'uno...
In Your Face: Professional Improprietes and the Art of Being Conspicuous in Sixteenth-Century Italy
by Douglas Biow Stanford University Press, 246 pp., $19.95 DAN TURELLO The ideals of grace and ease were ones that came to find great success and cultural currency during the Renaissance, in great measure thanks to the writing of Baldassarre Castiglione’s...
Italia reloaded. Ripartire con la cultura
by Christian Caliandro and Pier Luigi Sacco Il Mulino, 146 pp., 13.50 € JULIANNE VANWAGENEN - Culture as investment In the book’s premise, authors Christian Caliandro and Pier Luigi Sacco clearly state their goals for the work: (1) distinguish between...
Italo Calvino's Architecture of Lightness: The Utopian Imagination in an Age of Urban Crisis
by Letizia Modena Routledge, 267 pp., $146.00 ($99.75 ebook) DAN TURELLO “If you choose to believe me, good. Now I will tell you how Octavia, the spider-web city, is made. There is a precipice between two steep mountains: the city is over the void, bound...
La conversazione. Un modello italiano
by Amedeo Quondam Donzelli, 347 pp., € 28.00 CECELIA OLIVERIO “Would you care to bestow the grace of your dancing upon the gathered company?” asks the perfect courtier to his advisee. “Why, most absolutely not, my dear friend,” a slightly less than...
Les Abus de la mémoire
di Tzvetan Todorov Arléa, 61 pp., € 5.00 DALILA COLUCCI Appassionato studio sulle delicate questioni della memoria e dell’oblio nelle società occidentali alle soglie del secondo millennio, Les Abus de la Mémoire gioca la sua partita teorica sul pericoloso...
Menzogna
di Franca D'Agostini Bollati Boringhieri, 133 pp., 9.00 € DALILA COLUCCI - Per un'eudemonia della verità “C’è una teoria della verità di cui bisogna dare conto, ed è quella lanciata da Nietzsche negli ultimi decenni dell’Ottocento, e che ha avuto una...
Narratore notturno. Aspetti del racconto nella Gerusalemme liberata
di Francesco Ferretti Pacini, 393 pp., 25 € DALILA COLUCCI - Era la notte : Spunti (mancati) per la decifrazione di un tema “Era la notte, e ‘l suo stellato velo /chiaro spiegava e senza nube alcuna...”: le ripetute evocazioni di paesaggi notturni – siano...
Paura di cambiare. Crisi e critica del concetto di cultura
by Francesco Erspamer Donzelli, 169 pp., € 16.00 JOHN WELSH - The Invention of Culture It is a conversation all too familiar for anyone involved in the humanities. It happens most frequently in situations of involuntary socialization—parties, receptions...
Roland Barthes, le métier d'écrire
by Éric Marty Seuil, 335 pp., 23.30 € JOHN D'AMICO - « Images » de Roland Barthes Roland Barthes, le métier d’écrire, paru en 2006 aux Éditions du Seuil, est qualifié d’« essai », genre assez vague pour permettre à son auteur, Éric Marty, d’englober sous...
Scrittori polemisti: Pasolini, Sciascia, Arbasino, Testori, Eco
di Bruno Pischedda Bollati Boringhieri, 338 pp., € 18.50 DALILA COLUCCI- La scommessa dell'impegno “Lo scrittore è ‘in situazione’ nella sua epoca: ogni parola ha i suoi echi. Ogni silenzio anche”: è una suggestione di natura sartriana quella che si...
Storia culturale della fotografia italiana. Dal Neorealismo al Postmoderno
by Antonella Russo Einaudi, 428 pp., ill., € 35.00 CECELIA OLIVERIO Though the mere reference to the term “cultural history” is sometimes enough to push even the most tolerant of history buffs toward an apoplectic anxiety, fear not Antonella Russo’s ever...
Tastes and Temptations: Food and Art in Renaissance Italy
by John Varriano University of California Press, 282 pp., $19.50 PETER LIEBERMAN In 1505 the Florentine painter Andrea del Sarto, at a banquet held by the artistic and gastronomic confraternity known as ‘the Company of the Cauldron,’ presented a scale...
The Battle of Adwa: African Victory in the Age of Empire
by Raymond Jonas Harvard University Press, 413 pp., $29.95 JOHN WELSH - Empire defeated Robert E. Lee’s Confederate Army marched a remarkable 135 miles from Chancellorsville, Virginia to the battle of Gettysburg. Napoleon’s Russian Campaign, an arduous...
The Electric Information Age Book: McLuhan/Agel/Fiore and the Experimental Paperback
by Jeffrey T. Schnapp and Adam Michaels Princeton Architectural Press, 216 pp., $19.95 JOHN WELSH - The Message of the Book By dawn’s early light a young couple neck on Avenue A in New York’s lower East Side. In her left hand she holds a paperback copy of...
The Electric Information Age Book: McLuhan/Agel/Fiore and the Experimental Paperback
by Jeffrey Schnapp and Adam Michaels Princeton Architectural Press, 216 pp., $19.95 JULIANNE VANWAGENEN What do The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Electric Information Age Book have in common? They both have Tom Wolfe, the Grateful Dead, Allen...
The Future of Nostalgia
by Svetlana Boym Basic Books, 404 pp., $22.00 CHRISTOPHER BROWN - Riddles for Longing “Somewhere on the frontier, the ghost of Dostoevsky meets the ghost of Mickey Mouse. Like the characters from The Possessed, they exchange wry smiles.” Thus concludes...
Tunnel REvision: The Trento Tunnels
a cura di Jeffrey T. Schnapp e Giuseppe Ferrandi Fondazione Museo Storico del Trentino ELOISA MORA – Le Gallerie della memoria “Come siamo capitati in questo tunnel, proprio non lo so... ma la invito a riflettere: ci muoviamo su rotaie, il tunnel deve...
Una lama di luce
by Andrea Camilleri Sellerio, 271 pp., € 14.00 (€ 10.00 ebook) ELGIN KIRSTEN ECKERT Montalbano suffers from extreme loneliness. Long gone are the days in which he welcomed the peace and quiet of his beachfront home and reveled in the solitude of evening...
